Monday, November 02, 2009

Maestro Dal Segno and the Flying Grace Notes, Story #2

Today's story for LoStoWriMo is not complete. It's a 327 word beginning with the barest hint of the plot to come. Will it follow the escape-from-the-circus trope or take an unexpected turn into the mildly bizarre? (I accidentally wrote "bazaar" and wondered if my subconscious mind was trying to give me a hint.) I don't yet know.

Please feel free to leave your calling card in the form of a "Marked as read" comment.

MAESTRO DAL SEGNO AND THE FLYING GRACE NOTES

Neume had the bad luck to be born into a family of traveling musical circus performers. As the fifth of six children and the only son of Maestro Dal Segno and the Amazing Tessitura, he was expected to be a prodigy like his four older sisters and one younger sister whom Neume’s parents referred to as “The Glorious Surprise” but whose real name was Coda. Coda was a composer. The libretto of her first opera was a simple story about a group of ants that have their picnic spoiled by rain. The opera was only fifteen minutes long, but Coda was only four years old.

Neume could accurately pick out Bach’s Minuet in D on the piano and “What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?” on the glockenspiel. He was not tone-deaf, but he was not a musical genius. According to his older sisters, Neume was depressingly average.

Neume’s sisters performed with their parents as the core of Maestro Del Segno and the Flying Grace Notes. The sisters dazzled the audience with their waterfall of harmonies, but for Neume, the highlight of each performance was when his mother walked the high note without a net.

During the show, Neume’s job was to direct the audience to their seats and keep Coda from climbing into the orchestra pit. Afterward, he was in charge of clean-up. Once everyone else had gone to bed, Neume visited the cages to spend time with the instruments.

Had his older sisters paid proper attention, they would have realized Neume’s talents lay in the care of musical instruments. When he arrived, the instruments softly hummed and tootled in excitement and jostled each other to reach him first. Neume attended with care to each string, brass and woodwind and percussion instrument with his tuning fork and polishing rag. He was the only person whom the cello allowed to change its strings, and was able to calm down the timpani when it had a tantrum.